"It's more than just an urban legend now, the story of how the CIA created the "Hippie Movement", and introduced the counter-culture via the Laurel Canyon scene in Los Angeles.
Links with with the underworld of organized crime and the mob, this is about well-established channels involving drug dealing and distribution, murder, prostitution, child pornography, snuff movies and black magic – all part of a system of control and manipulation of high-profile personalities – a system which still thrives to this day…
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Neil Sanders author of "Your Thoughts are Not Your Own"
A surprising number of rock and roll stars of the 60s came from military and military intelligence families.
For example, the father of the Doors
Jim Morrison was the chief naval officer involved in the manufactured Gulf of Tonkin Incident that led to the Vietnam War.
And then the artists started dying like flies: Jim Morrison, Jim Hendrix, Janis Joplin and many others.
As for LSD, the military and the CIA had been playing with it extensively since the 1950s. Then they unleashed their supply on the youth culture with a well orchestrated promotional media campaign worthy of Madison Avenue via agents like federally-funded Harvard Professor Timothy Leary and former (?) Army Intelligence officer and crypto-fascist Stewart Brand ("Mr Whole Earth.") It's literally true that the roots of the drug culture and rock and roll are in the Pentagon and Langley.
Why did they do it?
To disrupt the anti-war campaign.
As any peace activist active in the early pre-LSD 60s will tell you, the introduction of hallucinogens shattered the energetic and broad based Bay Area peace movement. The Pentagon boys needed bodies and they didn't want an effective peace movement to get in their way of getting them.
If you attribute the murders of JFK, RFK and Martin Luther King to their opposition to a US war in Vietnam (and there is good reason to), then a little cultural monkey-wrenching is lightweight stuff in comparison…